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Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

We all know that nearly all cake decorators misspell "congratulations" every day.

(Um, John? I don't think...)

This is obviously because they're either drunk or completely incompetent.

(Okay now, we're totally gonna get in trouble for that...)

Now you might be saying, "I thought all drunk and completely incompetent people were politicians?"

(Well, that's true.)

But you would be wrong!

(I would?)

Which brings us back to cake.

(Oh, good.)

See? Comgratation. Interestingly enough, there are close to 3,000 accepted spellings of "congradulationed" in the decorators' dictionary.

Occasionally, though, they do spell it goodly:

Like so. Of course, sometimes after successfully spelling a word the thrill goes to the baker's head. Thusly we get "Ternifer" - a hybrid creation of "Terrific" and the name of the person who ordered the cake, perhaps?

Here again the decorator got the "hard" word right:

Sure, the number's a bit, well, wrong...but hey, numbers are hard!

Wisites: n. [wi-SET-eez] Small, fuzzy mammals indigenous to Uganda prized for their venom, which is said to cure gout and certain types of restless leg syndrome.

I have never left a comment before because, well, someone else usually says it first!!OK, here I go, this is only mildly relevant because usually I am paralytic on the floor by now pointing at the screen and gurgling inanely but today I managed to control myself.......you may regret that!I have to ask, is this a USA thing?I have peered hopefully now, into the window of many cake shops and all the supermarket cake aisles as well.I have yet to find a single, not one single, misspelled cake, and of the notorious "Cupcake Cake" there is NO sign, none at all (not that it would be accepted or bought if it did rear it's ugly little head....that's something that surprises me, btw, why do people buy those things??) So, I know you have had cakes sent from the UK, but they have usually been humorous, not "bad".Is this international?Is is confined to the Americas??Inquiring minds wish to know....

I fear Kirri is right and this is a "New World" problem....north of the 49th parallel we get CCC's (ptooie), irrational placement of plastic flotsam, and yes....bad grammar and spelling on our bakery products. However my partner wishes to add that the CCC (ptooie) appears to have only recently reared its ugly head and he is concerned that CakeWrecks is inadvertantly spreading this plague in much the way sensationalist news coverage encourages copy-cat murders....but I digress....

Taylor - Mantnes sounds like a holiday you celebrate with men without pants...

I have found a few wrecks, mostly of the CCC variety, locally. One of the bakers/decorators was my high school geometry teacher though... so the lettering is usually very accurately centered and spaced and even spelled right! (Makes me wanna retire to become a wreckerator!)

Look, I just want to point out...of course, I am not a professional cake decorator...but as a young teenager I once wanted to congratulate my sister and her husband on their wedding anniversary and I STAMPED OUT IN A SNOWY FIELD "Happy Anniversity". God, how embarrassing. But I can understand it. Sort of.

These spelling mistakes make me think the wreckorators are people for whom English is not their first language.

Up until now, I hadn't seen any wrecks here in Toronto (Canada), but recently, since another company took over our local grocery stores, I've started to see some! This other company is based in Montreal (where they speak French). Is there a connection?

@girlfmkitty: Just out of curiosity--why does "Ternifer" sound like a Mormon name? Do you know a lot of Mormons with weird names or something? I don't think our names are any weirder than those in the general population--and I see a lot of weird names (I work in a hospital). I'm from a family of 8, and all of us have perfectly normal, spelled correctly, names. In fact, all of my 54 Mormon cousins have normal names. Who do you hang out with?? :)

Maybe the probably lies with the ESL (English as a second language) decorators or people with no work ethic or maybe it's an homage to our failing school systems where standards are lowered and spelling skills have become "irrelevant" in the age of computer spell check. The problem is, there's no spell check with icing!

What will happen when this generation of texters who abbreviate everything and spell nothing must graduate to cake decorating?

After hoping upon hope to find a CW-worthy wreck, I came across a dandy at my local grocery store yesterday. But I was too chicken to take a picture of it with the bakery staff standing right there behind the counter! Oh why am I so lame? Also, I did not have a camera. That would help next time. Anyone have tips for how to get a good shot of a wreck without offending the wreckerators? Without buying the horrible thing, I mean. And presuming you have a camera.Liz in Seattle

VW: DebriOh come on--too easy! All these bad cake are covered in debri.

Honestly the last one looks either photo shopped, or messed with. As others have pointed out, it almost looks like a capital H, and scraping some of the icing off with a toothpick would be easy enough to do.

Hey ...Hey...Hey..you better not pick on us cake decorators...lol..do you want to know how many times I have spelled Congratulations right..only to have customers argue with me that it is wrong...and that it should be a d instead of a t ...please save us ....

I would pick up the cake as if I intended to buy it, but then take it to another part of the store, snap the photo with my camera, and then either return it to the counter or give it to the cashier as if I had changed my mind. I used to work in retail, so I wouldn't just leave it elsewhere, because it's a real pain to hunt down all the misplaced stuff in a store, even if it's in your job description. Plus, I'd feel like a double jerk otherwise.

I know it seems silly to go through all this Secret Squirrel maneuvering, but this way, no one gets offended (well, yet). :P

I have an answer for the cakes that are "nicely decorated with horrible writing". I work in a grocery store, and in the bakery department they sell cakes that are shipped in already decorated. All they have to do is write on the cake when the customer places an order. Most of the time it is done by someone with no training or past experience writing on a cake.

OH Jackie Blue, I totally am on your side..I once had a lady customer on the phone ordering her graduation cake and insisted that I spell congratulations with a D instead of a T. I insisted that was wrong. She argued with me, and angrily told me to "hang on a minute!", and she went and got a dictionary. I waited patiently and then when she returned to the phone..guess who was eating crow...er I mean CAKE..with congraTulations spelled correctly on it! LOL

Love your blog Jen. I have a feeling that you may have been taken for a ride on this one.Try blowing up the picture and look at the pixels around the t and i in wisties. I have a strong feeling (not 100% sure though) it may be photoshopped into saying wisties

My sister waited to have her baby shower until after her son was born, so out of town friends and relatives could see him. Therefore, we had a cake that said "Welcome, Henry."Well, it was supposed to say that.It said, "Welome, Henry."

Oh, Jackie Blue & Linda, your tales of argumentative, misspelling customers only reinforces Southern Gal's contention that dictionaries should be required in every bakery. Of course, that would make wreckspotting ever so much more difficult!

Just be sure to put those cakes in the "refridgerator" (I've had that argument, too!)

The second cake has me baffled. Was it a terrific season, a terrifying season or tenacious season? Because otherwise I'm going to assume ternifers are like deer and ducks and have their own hunting seasons. Perhaps this person bagged more ternifers than anyone else.

The "T" vs "D" argument reminds of when I was temping as a word processor at an insurance agency. I am a word fanatic (which makes it only fitting that I am now an English teacher in China!) and I changed the word "irregardless" to "regardless" on an adjuster's form. He came and royally chewed me out in front of everyone. I calmly told him that "irregardless" wasn't a word. He INSISTED that it was even when I supported my claim with a dictionary. He said that everyone "knew what it meant" so that meant it was a word! He tried to get me fired from the job, but the supervisor stepped in and told him if he wanted to use a word that didn't exist then that was his problem, but that she wasn't going to get rid of me!

Hilarious, as always :). I'm still struggling to wrap my brain around the "Frs" cake....wha...how...?

One digression though: what's with some commenters saying that it must be second-language speakers who wreck the inscriptions (and there are always a few!)?? Mithpellings such as we see here are more a symptoms of the awful educational system that gets away with imparting less-than-basic literacy skills, not ESL / native language issues. Random punctuation and phonetic (!!) (mis)spellings in a non-phonetic language like English are NOT the same as grammar problems, which WOULD be the result of English being a second language.

Sorry about the rant... but I teach at a research-1 university, and kids here no less than wreckerators don't know the difference between "you're" and "your"! And not one among them has been a non-native-speaker.

I have to agree with Anonymous... the last one looks like it has been messed after the original decorating. You can see the smudged white icing underneath the "i" and it is thicker than the letters on either side. I truly believe it was a capital "H" also...

The anniversary one isn't a mistake : obviously it involves some pre-2002 Frenchpeople who are having a really, really cheap anniversary.(At least I think Frs is the abbreviation for Francs, it might be Frc. 2002 is soooo long ago...)

After reading some of the comments posted,I thought I would help shed some light on what may be going on with a few of these cakes.

Some of the writing is done after the decorator has gone home for the day. Usually it is a cake that is bought out of the case. If writing is requested,the responsibility falls on the person waiting on you.

Any decorator who gave a cr*p would try to prevent mishaps by making sure her coworkers had fresh writing bags available,show them how its done and encourage them to practice,and as a last resort,leave marzipan cut outs with "Happy Birthday" already written on them.

As for the rest of these cakes,I can only speculate that it has something to do with a serious flaw in employee drug screening procedures.

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